


Fraudulent Courting: America’s Favorite Pastime

by mybffwonderwoman



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst with a Happy Ending, Episode: s05e01 The Gang Exploits The Mortgage Crisis, Episode: s12e10 Dennis' Double Life, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mac Continues The Coming-Out Process, POV Mac, Post-Season/Series 12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 16:28:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10994646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mybffwonderwoman/pseuds/mybffwonderwoman
Summary: the scheme is as simple as this: pretending to fall in love over and over and over again.





	Fraudulent Courting: America’s Favorite Pastime

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Papermich](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papermich/gifts).



The scheme is as simple as this: Good Realtor, Bad Realtor. The oh-so-soon-to-be-patented honey and vinegar technique will put two happy idiots in a brand new foreclosed home in thirty seconds flat. Make a pretty penny for everyone. Well, maybe not Dee, who is doing some kind of baby thing which is frankly annoying and complicated, and which Dennis said could hypothetically be combined with the house thing, but it seems unlikely.

Okay, so it turns out the tenants are still there and the kids are mean. 

Okay, so Dee won’t stop talking about the pool she’s getting to use at the surrogate couple’s house and you can’t swim there until you finish this thing.

Yeah, but you get sick matching blazers, and you make really good snacks for the showing, and he cups your face in his hands, and he calls you baby boy, and Frank walks in, and this is a scheme, remember? You’re play-acting and you’re taking other people for fools and it’s _fun_. 

You get really mean, let that vinegar heat up, and then uh, duh, you do it, those cowards say they’re going to buy the house! Dennis lights up like a Christmas tree, and honestly, it wasn’t even that hard when you make such a good team. And not to be a pussy and do free word association but when you’re thinking about Dennis right now in front of you and you’re thinking about calling him Honey, you think honey-bee-sweet-bright-sun-star and he really is shining in this moment even if this isn’t what he means when he says the thing about the golden god.

 So you’re not exactly mad when Frank says that we’re combining the house and baby thing after all and you and Dennis get to continue this shtick but up the ante. Now you’re partners in life, which means new complementary outfits and more – you don’t know, it’s probably gay to say ‘more touching’, wait, it’s definitely gay to say ‘more touching’, but there is an ease to this performance is what you mean. You move in unison without hesitation and neither of you flinch.

Okay, so it doesn’t work.

Okay, so you settle for doing a badass jack-knife into the pool instead of making several thousand dollars.

I mean, you get to keep the jackets.

 

* * *

 

The scheme is as simple as this: if Brian LeFevre is gay, Mandy From The Wade Boggs Layover will give up on trying to get him to be a father. Between Dennis’ innate talent for scamming woman and being able to mine your new authentic gay life experiences for inspiration, it will be totally easy to convince her of a passionate and enduring love affair that no shockingly blonde toddler can tear apart. Women are all about emotion and if you take up all of Dennis’ big feelings, there are none left for her.

Okay, so it puts a bit of damper on the whole apartment reveal. You’ve only been slaving over every single detail for months and months and months, keeping a weather eye open for each seemingly insignificant tchotchke to pop up on eBay, knowing that a missing piece would make or break the authenticity of this recreation. You did it, you did it by yourself, and honestly, he’ll get it, he’ll get the bigness of your work when Mandy Who Is Actually Pretty Nice is out of here and you both have time to breathe. 

Okay, so every time you try to finish each other’s sentences, you trip up, and every time you touch, you flinch. Everybody wakes up on the wrong side of the bed sometimes.

I mean, for some reason he won’t go for the whole power bottom spiel, which is usually such a gimme, but he winds his way back to the central idea, which you came up with, that you’re emotionally involved, that there’s no room for her, which is starting to sound more like a confession coming out of Dennis’ mouth than a smooth line, which is funny because you know what confessions sound like because you’re Catholic.

Yeah, but then Mandy Who Is Not Just Nice But Apparently Extremely Progressive For Whatever Dakota She’s From says the craziest thing, that there could be two dads, which like, you’ve known is possible in a vague way, but holy shit, that’s a real thing that could happen in your lifetime, to you.

Schemes change. The scheme could be as simple as this: raising a son with Dennis and the details get worked out as you go along.

Okay, so that’s crazy. You’re sorry you said it. You’re sorry you didn’t ask about the bed now, too, you guess, because he’s acting like it’s absurd when it’s – I’m sorry – it’s _nice_ and it’s been normal for over a year not that you’re counting.

It’s just that Dennis won’t stop moving. He hasn’t stopped moving since this kid and this lady arrived, and he was so impossibly still when you gave him the RPG and you could really see him, and you can’t right now – you never know what he’s thinking when he’s about to vibrate out of his skin.

Also he keeps closing doors in your face.

You wish he would appreciate how you keep being willing to roll with the punches. You’re beginning to feel like nothing you can say or do is the right thing right now and this knowing-you-will-disappoint-long-before-you-open-your-mouth smells a whole lot like the visiting room in prison.

You think the gimp cover was pretty good given the circumstances.

You can feel the scheme getting away from him, and it feels in a dumb way like watching the rum ham float away. You can’t tell if you’re the ham or Frank or you or all of the above in this scenario. 

You’re doing the alleyway spy murder, which should be badass because come on, dude, an alleyway spy murder! But Dennis is talking too fast and acting too slow and no one has any energy and you could swear it wasn’t like this yesterday. Yesterday, everything was normal.

Mandy Who Is Not Mad Just Disappointed doesn’t want someone who doesn’t want her and Brian so at least you were right about the whole emotion thing.

Never mind that you maybe did -- and honestly, you thought you saw that Dennis wanted – but he let them go, so you were wrong, you guess.

Didn’t you say, “I know you, man” with such confidence on Valentine’s?

Okay, so maybe there are the things you’re always just hoping he’ll like. Apartments, beds, inventions, schemes. But there are also the things you _know_ he likes. _Predator._ Monthly dinners. Steve Winwood. The mac and cheese before he knew it came right out of a box.

Dance parties!

Or.

Or.

Okay. 

Okay, it doesn’t make sense. Not when you’ve done, when you’ve been so, when.

You don’t always know the smart word in the right order but he’s always given you the assist there, and you need it now, when it doesn’t add up, when she had said two dads were better than one, but Dennis said nope, zero dads, but now, at the last possible second, yes, never mind, actually, let’s do one dad but it’s just him, and not even _just_ him, but just him and gone. 

Goodbye Charlie.

Big breath.

YouDeeFrank.

He said he loved the RPG and the Range Rover but he leaves them both without a second thought.

 

* * *

 

The scheme is as simple as this: scam free Philadelphia Eagles tickets from the LGBT visibility group Gays At The Game by signing up for their jumbotron kiss-in. With no obligation to actually kiss, you keep assuring Dennis, whose silence you take for trepidation.

Whose silence has been growing and expanding and blanketing the whole freaking bar since he got back.

Okay, so he came back different. He comes back and stays with Dee instead of at your apartment, which makes it officially yours in the singular sense, you guess. He’s quiet, and you’ve known him not to talk before -- to sulk, to connive, to judge, to punish, to observe -- but this is something else, a flavor you don’t know, a storm too far out on the horizon to really guess its strength and source.

Okay, so you catch him on the phone to Mandy in the alleyway, speaking softly, and he hangs up as soon as he sees you, even though you’re in the midst of going back inside to give him some privacy.

Yeah, well, you stayed but you’re different, too. You have significantly more rainbow stuff in your closet, and dated a few dudes, I mean not seriously, but a few dates, and you’re not yelling as much, you think, though you don’t know if one thing really caused the other.

You’re fine. He just won’t make eye contact as you queue up albums and albums of Chicago on the jukebox.

He may be freezing you out, but he’s in on every single group scheme 100% since his return. Nothing was ever explicitly said, but you know he knew he had to earn his way back in. He doesn’t even yell about the Range Rover going up in smoke, just grimaces ever time you have to go someplace in Dee’s car.

So you figure a scheme for just the two of you might help things get back to normal. And Dennis has been gone long enough to truly, madly, deeply miss the Eagles, so the thought of free, very-few-strings-attached lower level end zone tickets is enough to make him act a little less achingly weird and distant.

Okay, so you have to pretend to be dating and gay and cool enough to kiss each other in front of 69,176 football fans and possibly on national television. But you just have to pretend all that stuff because it’s a scam and once you have the tickets and you’re there, you just won’t go through with it, and they can’t kick you out for _not_ kissing. You can say you chickened out or just say nothing at all and not go to those Gays At The Game meet-ups anymore even if they were fun and made you feel like you didn’t have to choose between what you think you’re supposed to be like now that you’re out and who you were before.

This is seriously one of the simplest of your schemes to date, when you think about it. 

You pitch it to him late one night, and you wait until Dee’s getting her purse from the back office and Frank and Charlie have already gone home and you make sure Dennis has a cold beer in his hand first, just to make sure he’s at ease. 

You pitch it with Fight Milk-levels of passion and you commit to smiling through the whole thing with such consistency that your face hurts by the end of it. 

Dennis picks at the label of his beer bottle and looks slightly to the right of your face which is a neat trick you don’t think you would have noticed before and it makes you scared for a second that maybe he’s been not looking at you for years.

“You don’t have to pretend to be gay,” he says, “you really are.”

Yeah, you know that, you were just explaining everything so he’d get it.

He gets it. He glances towards the office and he looks almost like he wants to check with Dee first, which is patently absurd because he doesn’t need a permission slip from his sister.

I mean, how would a bird even sign a permission slip.

Dee still isn’t coming out of that office, and Dennis nods so slightly you wonder for a second if you’re hallucinating the outcome you’ve been wishing for, but then he says, “Yeah, okay, but we don’t tell the rest of the gang,” and you’ve never agreed to anything faster in your life. 

The five-pound weights that have been sitting on your lungs for a week get switched out for two-pound ones.

Okay, so you knew this wasn’t going to be super hard but you didn’t realize it would be this easy.

Candy. Baby. You two. These tickets.

You swan into the GatG meeting arm-in-arm, you and – if it ain’t broke, why fix it – Hugh Honey, and everyone’s nice to him and nice to you, and when Jason and Erica whisk you away to pepper you with questions about the new boy, you get nervous about leaving Dennis on his own, but when you come back from your sidebar, he’s thriving. Spinning stories of all the dates you never went on. Holy shit, all of a sudden it reminds you of what, ten, twelve years ago when Paddy’s was a gay bar for a hot second and then you remember that that ended bad for Dennis and it’s like those weights on your lungs just slip down and land in the pit of your stomach to stay there. 

He gets along with everybody. With people it took you months to get along with. It’s a little unfair, honestly, but then are you allowed to be mad when he spent almost a year in some Dakota with, like nobody but a toddler and Mandy and you assume some barren prairie wasteland, and now your palms are clammy as you take his hand in yours, as you tuck the little envelope with the tickets in the breast pocket of your over-sized Hawaiian shirt.

He locks eyes with you and his gaze is steady and he’s checking in and you really did forget how magnetizing he is when he’s deep in a scheme when he can play pretend. You give him the it’s-okay smile and you do another social round and you move in perfect unison and neither of you flinch until you’re out the door and two blocks away from the community center and you let go of each other’s hands.

The tickets sit in your pocket, sit on your dresser, sit in the pointiest most infuriating corner of your mind for a whole week and you just keep acting normal, you keep saying dumb shit to make Dee and Dennis exclaim and laugh and throw up their hands, you huff a little glue with Charlie and almost tell him but don’t, and then suddenly, you’ve made it and the day is here.

You don’t know what Dennis tells Dee about where he’s going. He just shows up knocking on your door at 9 A.M. because you guys have to get there the second the stadium opens if you’re going to beat your record for most beer consumed without technically violating Lincoln Financial’s two-beer-per-customer-per-purveyor rule.

Dennis drew up a little map on a cocktail napkin last night that’ll lead you from the Bud Light Eagles Nest to the Bud Zone Bar to the Miller Lite Tailgate Zone to the Miller Lite Phlite Deck and every un-named bar set-up along the way, and then the trick is trying to buy from as many different beer-sellers in the stands as possible until you fall asleep, throw up, and get ejected from the field for starting a fight. It’s a little more intense than you expected from him, given the fact that he must have taken a break from the whole unrestrained alcoholism while on his fatherhood sabbatical, but you also don’t want to get on his case if this is somehow about him proving that he’s still got it, so you just shrug happily and follow him out.

It’s not until you’re in the Lyft on the way there that you realize you forgot to slick down your hair.

You get there, you get in, this really is simple, and you’ve been waiting all this time for Dennis to withdraw now that there’s nobody to perform for but instead he’s light and bright in a way you almost forgot was possible. Your shoulders bump while you’re waiting in line and of course he steps away because of course but he does it in such a way that reassures you rather than make you feel like you fucked up.

Seven beers in and you go to check out these sweet seats for the first time and he asks how the whole Kiss-cam thing was supposed to work – like, is Gays At The Game just hoping if there are enough gays at the game that surely the Kiss-cam will land on one of them?

“No, dude,” you laugh. “Derek met the guy who runs the Kiss-Cam at a bar and we fundraised until we had enough money to bribe him. We bought a couple of different pairs of seats around the stadium and he’s gonna show ours for sure. As a plan, dude, it’s pretty badass.”

Dennis nods but his smile gets just a little bit fake.

You each get five more beers -- for an even dozen -- and settle in for the game.

It’s been an okay season, but the Eagles are actually doing all right this time. 

The Kiss-Cam shows some straight randos and they make out a whole bunch.

Okay, so it’s super badass to be in the end zone and you may be getting a sunburn but Dennis is actually glowing and the beer has put a rose in his cheeks that’s better than any of his blushes if somebody asks you which nobody has.

The Kiss-Cam shows some straight randos and they are really uncomfortable and just kiss each other on the cheek.

You get more beer and you take turns holding the cold cans to each other’s foreheads and laughing about it and then pretending to mad when the beer’s lukewarm when you finally drink it.

Another straight couple.

Another.

You’re starting to get nervous because at a certain point you’re gonna show up on the screen and you’re going to disappoint all your gay friends, so you’re pointedly not looking at it, when Dennis gives you a mean elbow in the ribs that reminds you that he really is related to that bird and you look up.

He wants to know what Dee’s doing up there on the jumbotron.

Oh. Shit. Well, I guess she decided to take the tickets after all. 

“She brought the Waitress,” you say helpfully as the two women lean in and kiss on a fifty-foot screen for half of Philadelphia to see.

Dennis looks like he’s disassociating.

“Dennis, you know she’s bi, right?” 

Nothing.

“No way she didn’t tell you.”

Nothing. 

“She didn’t tell you? The Waitress is a whole thing but, dude, we go to gay stuff together all the time now! It’s uh mlm-wlw solidarity.”

You’re watching Dennis piece his brain back together very slowly.

“Mac, what the fuck is mulm-wulwuh solidarity?”

“It’s when dudes who like dudes and chicks who like chicks hang out!”

You can feel his agitation rising and you can’t believe Dee coming out is what’s going to ruin this afternoon. That bi bitch.

“You mean to tell me. That while I was gone. You all like had an awakening. And now you and Dee just hang out! Being gay.”

“No – I mean, yeah, but just because I started going to therapy at this gay counseling place and you know how her old therapist didn’t really work out and—” 

“You mean to tell me. Mac. That you’re in – that you and Deandra are both in gay therapy, together now, and you’re both gay! And hanging out and living your authentic lives! While I was – I mean, do you even -- And the Waitress! Who, lest we forget, is pregnant with Charlie’s child! Is also gay! I mean, who ISN’T GAY IN THIS SCENARIO, MAC?”

“YOU, DUDE.”

You start to turn back to the game because being part of the gang has gotten you used to certain levels of public altercation but this is something different and the family of four that’s an aisle over definitely isn’t loving all this gay yelling but Dennis kind of grabs your face and turns it back to face him. 

You have a split second where nothing happens but looking at each other and he looks so mad but not in the vein-popping way of the suburbs or the gold stars or the high school reunion but honestly kind of like Charlie when he’s trying to learn how to write a new word and he’s frustrated with himself for not getting it right but you know he’s going to keep trying at it until it’s at least moderately legible. 

Then he.

Uh.

Um.

He kisses you.

And it’s not different from any of the other dudes you’ve kissed, when it comes to style or intensity or taste and there’s something reassuring to the sameness, but also all those guys were strangers and here you are kissing someone you know with your whole heart.

Oh, you closed your eyes and you didn’t realize.

You open your eyes and realize he did, too.

You pull apart.

You look to the display screens and it’s still just showing the game, which is still going on, and the world is still going on, which seems miraculous.

“You didn’t have to do that just then,” you say, which you know is stupid but you have to have it said. “We weren’t like on the Kiss-cam.”

“Mac.”

The way Dennis says it makes your name sound round and whole and warm and all things it’s never been rolling off of anybody else’s tongue.

He chose this, and he chose it before he got on the plane back to Philadelphia, and he’ll keep choosing it, sober or drunk or high or strung out.

Someone nudges you, points you towards the jumbotron where you can see your two big dumb faces rendered in a billion pixels.

You choose this, too. And truly through God all things are possible.

**Author's Note:**

> endless gratitude to cmc for reading every anxious 3 A.M. draft & not roasting me too badly about my inability to get my life in order.
> 
> thanks to HAIM for choosing to release "want you back" and "right now" as the first singles from their forthcoming second album. i can only assume from the lyrics of these songs that "something to tell you" will be a concept album about macdennis post-s12 and i for one couldn't be more excited.


End file.
